The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  The petition was bitterly contested, not least by the Methodist Overseas Missions, which supported the government’s decision to grant the mining leases. In 1971, the courts ruled against the Yirrkala claimants, holding that any rights which the Indigenous people may have had before colonisation had been invalidated by the Crown. The mining giant Nabalco was allowed to proceed with its plans. In 1978, the Yolngu did eventually receive title to their land under the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976. The mining leases to which they had objected, however, were specifically excluded from the provisions of this Act. In the years between the court case and the return of the land, 4,000 white Australian mining employees and their families arrived in the area. Today, having bought the Nabalco plant in 2007, Rio Tinto extracts 1.8 million tonnes of alumina per annum from its refinery, with plans to spend US$2.3 billion in order to expand its total capacity to 3.8 million tonnes per annum. This will make it one of the largest refineries in the world.

  The charismatic go-between Wandjuk Marika, c. 1960.

  As the pressures on their way of life intensified, each of the key protagonists of bark politics continued to develop their own individual style. Munggurrawuy established an important and productive relationship with Jim Davidson, who saw that his paintings were collected by major Australian and international museums. After Munggurrawuy’s death in 1979, his life’s work continued to inspire his daughter Gulumbu Yunupingu, and the many Gumatj artists who have succeeded him. Amongst the Rirratjingu, Mawalan also taught his two eldest daughters to paint their family designs during the 1960s. Though they never received any credit for these early works, they may well have been the first women in history to paint on bark. They were not acknowledged as artists in their own right until decades later.35

  Following Mawalan’s death, Mathaman Marika became the leader of the Rirratjingu. As such he was ultimately responsible for the ownership of the Dhuwa moiety myth cycles. Mathaman was a master of juxtaposition, building a fluent rhythm of crosshatching against human and animal figures painted in silhouette. His beautifully executed and richly complex works relate the exploits of the great ancestral beings that form the basis of Rirratjingu law: the creatures, places and totems that the Djang’kawu, Wagilak and Wuyal created on their travels. Mathaman was the first bark painter in the region to consistently mix pigments, softening the customary contrasting colours to produce a subtle and radiant effect. He preferred sepia and olive green – colours he achieved by veering away from strong black by mixing it with yellow. His use of orchid bulb juice to bind the earth pigments imparted a soft matt finish and muted tones, which differed markedly from the shiny effect of pigments mixed with European-style wood glue adopted by many who followed him.36

  As Mathaman lay dying, corroborees were being organised to protest the arrival of the Nabalco bulldozers. In his final moments, he called the young men to instruct them. Upon his death, Wandjuk, the eldest son of the eldest son, was to become the senior Rirratjingu leader, and custodian of Yalan’bara. Upon this sacred beach, the Djang’kawu had stepped from their canoe with the rising sun, plunging their digging sticks into the sand to bring forth freshwater springs. They had travelled across the land creating and naming its features and giving birth to the original people. This story and the major, epic, morality tale of the Wagilak sisters37 was Wandjuk’s artistic legacy. In time, he added stories to his artistic repertoire that linked the Munyuku and the Marrakulu clans with the Rirratjingu.

  Two others who painted for Chaseling at Yirrkala from 1935 onward were Narritjin Maymuru and his brother Nanyin. Their paintings helped to secure funds for the church and for themselves. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that held out until the establishment of the mine and the town that serviced it. With the town came alcohol, which ravaged the community, prompting many elders to establish permanent outstations away from Yirrkala.

  By the time that Narritjin had become the leader of the Manggalili clan in the 1940s, this small but distinctive nomadic group of about 50 people were living at Djarrakpi, Cape Shield, in North East Arnhem Land.

  Manggalili clan designs consist of diamonds, rows of dashes, anvil shapes and an ‘x’ pattern that is derived from the breast girdle worn by ancestral women during mourning ceremonies. Narritjin’s particular artistic genius lay in the way his figurative elements always remained subservient to these intricately rendered clan patterns that he skillfully applied with human hair brushes. He used black silhouette, or sometimes limited patterning, to depict animal, human and spirit figures and created an optical effect by placing them against intricate backgrounds. One of his recurrent subjects was Guwak, the koel cuckoo, who created the lagoon and sand dunes of his homelands, whilst travelling with Marrngu, the possum. In order to portray lengthy narratives such as this, Narritjin segmented his barks into panels through which the stories meander.38

  Manggalili clan leader Nanyin Maymuru.

  In 1974, Narritjin’s two eldest sons died, and with his own sudden death in 1981 his dream of an outstation at Djarrakpi lay unfulfilled. After another five of his children died over the following decade, his remaining clan descendants finally established a homeland centre on Cape Shield in 1995. Painting became the means by which this small settlement could remain viable; a testament to Narritjin’s powerful instruction and commitment to Manggalili culture. Narritjin had learned clan mythology from his mother’s maternal grandfather, Birrikitji, at Yirrkala. He in turn had taught his children and his brother’s children to paint. His sons, Manydjilnga and Banapana, and his brother’s son, Baluka, all gained notoriety as painters. They were followed in the 1960s by two of his daughters, Bumiti and Galuma.

  Of these great leaders and artists, only Wandjuk Marika lived to play an important role in the developing Aboriginal art industry. When I first met him, in 1982, he was enjoying the very first solo exhibition of his career, at the Hogarth Galleries in Sydney. Slight of build, with long fine fingers, a flowing beard and red headband, he spoke softly yet with great authority. He was already a seasoned traveller, attending exhibitions of his own and other Indigenous artists’ work all over the world. He was also one of the first tribal Aboriginal men I met who had taken a balanda wife, his third, the petite Jenny Home Wulula, a teacher. Together they had a gorgeous daughter, Mayatili.

  Wandjuk’s career as an artist and a diplomat must have been exhausting. For over a decade he was constantly travelling. He was appointed a member of the Australia Council for the Arts in 1970, and between 1973 and 1979 he played a vital role in promoting Aboriginal art to the world, first as a committee member and later as Chairman of its Aboriginal Arts Board. He flew to Moscow on his first overseas trip in 1973, and travelled to New Guinea the following year.

  Narritjin Maymuru, c. 1960.

  The great Australian statesman and Aboriginal leader Wandjuk Marika at Apmira opening, Sydney, 1982. (Juno Gemes © Juno Gemes Archive)

  A consumate politician and an absolute charmer, Wandjuk’s fiery reaction to some cheap tea-towel and T-shirt designs in the early 1970s probably offers a greater insight into his showmanship than all the accolades that were heaped upon him as a dignitary. He was so incensed when he discovered that his secret, sacred designs had been appropriated for mass-produced textiles that he threw a bundle of them in front of an assembly of Australia Council members, challenging them to do something about it. In his world there was no cultural precedent for taking someone else’s design and using it, without having earned the right.39 Determined to stop this sacrilegious rip-off, he sent some of the tea-towels to the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. This instigated one of the first landmark Indigenous copyright cases, and he worked until his death to have Aboriginal rights recognised in national law.

  By the early 1980s, Wandjuk Marika OBE was the greatest international ambassador for Aboriginal culture in Australia’s history. He had made a major contribution toward the development of the market for Aboriginal art, and advised the Australian government on many projects t
o do with Indigenous affairs. Yet his greatest concern was the official protection of sacred sites. He was easily moved to tears by the silencing of ‘the voices’ that belonged to his homelands. ‘The land is full of knowledge’ he told his biographer and close friend Jennifer Isaacs, grieving for the loss of thousands of years of accumulated culture.40 During his later years, as his busy public life exhausted him, he grew frail and craved refreshment from his spiritual home at Yalan’bara. After selling works to the National Gallery of Australia from his 1982 solo exhibition, he was able to move his family away from the distracting town life of Yirrkala, and back to the sacred beaches of the Djang’kawu ancestors.41 There, overlooking the Arafura Sea, houses were built, freshwater bores were sunk, and Wandjuk relished life in the bush once more.

  The greatest didgeridoo player I’ve ever known: Alan Dargin, painting the Peace Walkway, Sydney Opera House forecourt, 1986.

  Beware – artists at work.

  One of my favourite memories of Wandjuk was the occasion when he came to Sydney with his seven sons to dance at the dawn opening ceremony of the Te Ao Marama42 Maori exhibition in 1986. This event had taken all of my new friend Joe Croft’s extensive New Zealand connections to organise. I had spent months arranging the funding and involving the Sydney Maori community.

  It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Charlie Perkins that his status as Aboriginal Australia’s most senior public figure would be enhanced if this formal ‘relish’ (or Wiata43) was performed by the most prestigious dancers in the land immediately after his opening speech. At the same time I had Kingi Ihaka, the head of the Sydney Maori community, warning me that the most important Aboriginal leaders must be present. This would mark the first time that Indigenous Australians ‘officially’ welcomed Maori people to the country in accordance with their ancient protocols. It simply had to be done properly. Finally at the last minute, Charlie Perkins agreed to pay for Wandjuk’s family to fly down from the Top End so that they could perform.

  Over the next few days, I forged a bond with Charlie and was able to watch at close quarters how cleverly he managed to play off the competing forces around him. He had been the first recipient of a liver transplant in Australia, yet even so, 15 years later, no-one could keep up with him. Including me. I found him absolutely inspiring.

  The opening began before the sun rose on the Sydney Opera House, with 52 visiting Maori elders resplendent in feather cloaks, enticing the large crowd into the exhibition hall, as television cameras jostled for position. Following the official speeches by Perkins and the New Zealand Ambassador, Wandjuk’s strikingly lithe teenage sons, adorned with feathered girdles and crowned with fine white down, leaped and cried out as Wandjuk invoked ancient incantations. Little Mayatili, then no more than five years of age, sat beside him, her face painted in white ochre. The crowd was spellbound. Unfortunately, later that morning someone threw an egg at the Queen in New Zealand, and not one scrap of footage of the opening made it into the mainstream news.

  Over the following days Louise Ferrier, who was still my incredibly well connected business partner at the time, ran a workshop funded by a grant from the Australia Council to celebrate the International Year of Peace. The visiting Maori artists worked alongside 50 enthusiastic locals, including Louise Olsen, Martin Sharp, Gary and Judith Shead, Gordon Syron, Peter Kingston, Bruce Goold and Alan Dargin to create a Peace Walkway along the harbour foreshore. The temporary scaffolding leading to the Opera House was decorated with bold bright designs and colours. In one of his more pompous moments, culture maven Leo Schofield decried the Peace Walkway as ‘a mess’ in his Sydney Morning Herald column. Nowadays of course, jazzing up construction sites with art in this way is absolutely commonplace.

  Only a year after this wonderful event Wandjuk Marika took ill and suddenly died. He was revered throughout Australia as a masterly negotiator between cultures. But Wandjuk was never just a middleman. He was an absolutely fearless and deeply religious leader who refused to be intimidated by the white establishment. In her remarkable book Wandjuk Marika, Life Story, Jennifer Isaacs compared him to the great Native American activists Black Elk of the Lakota Sioux and Chief Seattle of the Suquamish. He was certainly one of Australia’s greatest statesmen.

  The most senior Indigenous public servant of his time, Charlie Perkins (left) was vitally interested in promoting Aboriginal art. Here he is with me and Joe Croft at an exhibition opening, c. 1989.

  QUEENSLAND – THE SUNSHINE STATE

  As I was growing up in Sydney’s salubrious eastern suburbs, the closest thing to Aboriginal culture that I encountered was a song called My Boomerang Won’t

  Come Back, by the English comedian Charlie Drake. It was a hit around the world in 1961, and my brother and I loved and knew every word of it by heart. Preteens, we were blissfully unaware as we chanted the words with our friends that its conflation of Aboriginal stereotypes was insulting and racist. Delivered in a Cockney accent, the song used the Native American term pow wow, and featured African drumming and references to a ‘witch doctor’. The joke at the bottom of the whole song was the laziness of ‘the Aboriginal race’, in this case a young man whose boomerang wouldn’t come back because he was too stupid to throw it in the first place. It’s impossible now to even guess what inspired the song, but it still haunts the internet, and has been translated into many different languages.

  We got a lot a trouble chief, on account of your son Mack.

  My son Mack, why what’s wrong with him?

  His Boomerang wont come back!

  Oom chucka weya chucka, Oom chucka weya chucka.

  The best boomerang thrower I’ve ever met was Frank Carlo. Barrel-chested and stocky, his right arm was so powerful that he could throw a boomerang at least 100 meters. I remember watching one sail to the end of a large field over the tops of a stand of gum trees and return to be caught casually in his left hand, his feet planted firmly on the ground – a skill which eluded me as my feeble attempts fell short of 25 meters, no matter how many times I tried.

  In 1983 Frank and his wife Florence, both of Murri descent44 decided to start their own Aboriginal art prize, up in Caboolture in Queensland, and I was honoured to be the judge. The Carlos, who worked tirelessly to promote their culture, mentored dozens of young Aboriginal men. They built a business manufacturing boomerangs, clap sticks and small portable bark paintings based on designs copied from Arnhem Land. They were a hardworking exemplary couple, and a rebuke to the commonly held belief that Aboriginal people are innately lazy. Even so, the Carlos’ idea for an art prize was a daring one.

  The 19th century had been particularly unkind to the original inhabitants of Queensland. By the beginning of the 20th century their numbers had halved from 70,000 to less than 35,000. ‘Trouble-makers’ (usually male) from other regions were forcibly shunted off to Queensland missions for resettlement and reform. Here they intermarried with the local people and had children of mixed Indigenous background. Hard cases could be sent to mission after mission. This created multi-tribal communities such as Cherbourg, Yarrabah, Woorabinda and Palm Island. Today, the Indigenous descendants of former generations, who mixed with those ‘transported’ to the Sunshine State, have Dreaming stories from widely divergent regions on both their mothers’ and fathers’ side. The impact of this social fragmentation on the art of the region was profound. Because of this mix of derivative regional styles, Queensland art was not considered to be ‘fine art’ until very recently.

  When I first began looking for Aboriginal art, I was surprised to find Queensland offered a hotchpotch of styles. Many of the craft items were unique, but much of the gift and tourist ‘product’ seemed to either mimic or appropriate imagery from other regions. I didn’t understand why until I had met a number of Murri (Queensland) artists, and learned about their mixed ancestry. Although there were a small number of urban artists, like Tracey Moffatt, Judy Watson and Fiona Foley, beginning to make their mark, they were developing their art practice down south. Thr
oughout the 1960s Queensland communities, missions and fledgling workshops, like the one owned by the Carlos, sent their art and artefacts to a shop and wholesale warehouse in Brisbane called Queensland Aboriginal Creations, which was established by the Department of Native Welfare in 1959. Here you could choose from about 30 different standard-sized images on bark, and a range of odd esoteric craft works, basketry and artefacts. Boomerangs, clap sticks and bull roarers ranged from those made and painted for tourists through to genuine collector’s items. These were on-sold to the small number of galleries and souvenir shops that existed at the time.

  When Flo and Frank flew me up from Sydney to judge the entries I was surprised to view a far wider array of art and craft than I had expected. Nothing like it could be seen in shops and galleries south of the border. I had to pick a winner from a fascinating selection of bark and dot paintings, basketry, ceramics and sculpture. Everyone was flabbergasted when I chose a figurative scene of a traditional bush camp, painted in a European style by an unknown young man called Mark Garlett. Mark drove at breakneck speed from Brisbane to Caboolture to collect his $500 prize, which would have seemed like a small fortune at the time. I took the painting myself instead of the promised judging fee, and it still hangs in my kitchen.

  Little has survived of Queensland’s cultural heritage other than artefacts and rock art. The exceptions are the sketches that documented the brutality of the Native Police Corps against its own people in the western region. The Native Police, who were trained to shoot ‘wild’ blacks, were the most controversial and divisive force in colonial history, and were gradually disbanded in the 1890s.

  The western region also attracted the interest of the innovative and influential Sydney artist Margaret Preston, who collected sculptural pieces created at Dajarra near Cloncurry around 1941. Then in her mid 60s, Preston had been fascinated by cave painting and Aboriginal objects for more than a decade. After travelling extensively throughout Australia, she became one of the first white artists to openly acknowledge the huge impact of Indigenous design on her own evolution as a painter and printmaker.